New CloudSat images

Submitted by eebee on Thu Jun 8 2006 11:57pm

...might help, once they become available to mere mortals like us skaters. Graeme Stephens of CSU Atmospheric Science Dept., says that through the new CloudSat technology, which is a thousand times more sensitive than any other satellite-based radar: “It can answer the question ‘Why is it dry here and not dry somewhere else?’”. For skating purposes, though, we don't care about the why, just the whether.

Take a look! As a weather geek, this one's my favorite (a horizontal cross-section of a storm in Africa)...

Anyway, they say it'll help with predicting climatological trends. Because it's so much more sensitive than current ground-based radar, it should show rain developing inside a storm, not just where it's already falling. Wow!!! I guess though because it's satellite, it won't take pictures but every 90 mins or so. So when trying to decide if it's worth the gas driving out to our skate course of choice, we can continue to rely on a combination of radar, good old eyesight, and hope! But better to err on the side of getting to skate.

Comments

Wow those CloudSat images are awesome. I'm sure they'll be coming to a tv near us soon! It will be exciting to see what really useful info will be available to us directly on the web to learn about all of this.

Tim and I were skating wednesday (june 21) and it was raining, and we could see it on Lake 5B at Country Park, but it never was visible on the road. The surface was so hot I guess it never had time to show before evaporating? I don't know but I could feel it hit my skin and see it hit the lake but not the asphalt.

Today it was blistering hot and no rain to be found, but we were code orange for ozone I think, so it was a good idea to take it mostly easy and I did only 40 minutes or a bit less of actual skating.

Thanks for sharing these links and please follow up on news on this topic!